


For the Future

by kawree



Category: Wreck-It Ralph (2012)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-25
Updated: 2012-11-25
Packaged: 2017-11-19 11:58:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/573025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kawree/pseuds/kawree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sergeant Calhoun doesn't believe in nightmares, but that doesn't stop them from haunting her.  She doesn't believe Felix can fix that, either, but that doesn't stop him from trying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For the Future

Tamora Jean Calhoun approached sleeping with the same feminine delicacy and composed grace with which she approached everything else in her life. That is to say, she really didn't do girlish nightgowns or silken sheets, and she really didn't care about whatever they meant by 'beauty sleep'; she was going to sleep hard and fast and efficient and nothing anyone said was going to change her stance on it.

Well, at least that was the image she tried to project. The fact of the matter was Tamora hadn't really gotten a good night's sleep since Brad's death, and she had a feeling that wasn't something that was going to change anytime soon. She blamed the executives who had turned Brad's vision into a deadly mistake. She blamed the programmers for putting these nightmares into her code.

Mostly she blamed herself for not being able to change any of it.

The nightmares were always the same. She guessed that was the trouble with that sort of programming: unlike the imagination, code was finite, and she supposed that was a small victory, in a way. Even if her thoughts could have strayed and evolved into visions that were far more ghastly (she was secretly glad she hadn't been close enough to see Turbo's face on that Cy-Bug atop the mountain; Ralph's stories about it later had been unsettling enough), the fact that it was All Part of the Program saved her from unconsciously doing so.

The familiar scene emerged from the haze of her sleeping mind like a well-known landscape appearing in a lifting fog. She stood at the altar in her beautiful gown, her handsome, charming fiance beside her in his tuxedo. The minister pronounced them husband and wife. She grabbed Brad by the collar and closed her eyes, pulling him toward her to kiss him fiercely, but the lapels of his tuxedo did not yield to the touch of her fingers. Opening her eyes, her breath caught in her throat as she saw the gunmetal-grey exoskeleton of a Cy-Bug beneath her hands. Cold horror swirled in her gut as she looked up to see the creature's jaws open wide, a gaping maw to swallow her up. That was when she saw Brad's terrified eyes, his face twisted in pain and fear at the back of the beast's throat, and before she had a chance to reach for her gun--

With a sharp gasp Tamora jerked awake, sweat beaded on her brow and the taste of bile in the back of her throat. She never screamed. A scream could get you found, and getting found could get you killed on the battlefield, and a soldier quickly learned to sleep as though they were part of the terrain: still and silent. The sound of her heart pounding in her ears was deafening, though, and it was always a wonder to her that no one else could hear it.

She stared straight ahead at the far side of the room for a moment, the corners and lines only vaguely familiar in the semidarkness. There was a brief instant of further alarm as she realized she wasn't home, she wasn't in her game, this wasn't her bunk, and she jumped when there was movement beside her.

"Are you all right?" Felix's voice was quiet, worried, and she sighed audibly, relaxing. 

She was still getting used to the idea of not being alone anymore. She'd always had her troops, her job, her duty, but after Brad's death she had closed off her _self_ to everything, tying the broken bits of her heart together with old twine and locking them behind a heavy steel door. It was going to take a while before she really settled with the idea of spending her nights in his apartment, but the bunkers in her own game weren't exactly conducive to sleepovers. She had a feeling it was going to take even longer to really wrap her head around being married. Again. Could she even _say_ 'again'? They hadn't even been able to complete their vows--

"I'm fine," she replied, shifting onto her back to stare at the ceiling. She wanted to fold her arms over her abdomen but one of them was trapped beneath Felix's neck--the man was an insufferable cuddler (and even more surprising to her was that she didn't particularly mind it, in the end). She just huffed a sigh and pressed her free hand to her forehead, grinding the heel of it into the ridge of her eyebrow.

He rolled over to face her (he really had no choice but to be the little spoon, after all) and she quickly reclaimed her arm, crossing both of them tightly over the sheet covering her ribcage, avoiding her husband's gaze. She could practically _feel_ the pout sink into Felix's expression.

"N-no, I, ah... I really don't think you are," he said in that tenuous uncertain way of his that meant he wanted to say more but wasn't sure he was allowed to. He reminded her of walking on ice, the way he sort of tiptoed around things a lot of the time, unsure whether or not the weight of his words would break something, no matter how innocuous they were.

"It was just a nightmare," she said in that stern and unyielding way of hers that meant she would brook no further arguments. Unfortunately, that tone never seemed to work with him, and her gaze flicked toward him when he sat up and folded his arms very pointedly at her. 

"Much as I hate to doubt the word of a lady," he said, and she made a sound between a cough and a laugh (she? A lady?), "this is the third time it's happened this week."

She made a little indignant sound in the back of her throat at that; she hadn't even realized he'd woken up the other times. It seemed Fix-It Felix Calhoun Jr. was far craftier than he let on. She rolled her eyes and looked away, pressing her arms a little more tightly over her ribs.

"Jeannie..."

She flinched, though almost imperceptibly. It had been a bit hard to break him of his 'ma'am' tendencies, but no one had called her _Tamora_ since she was a child. She couldn't bear the thought of being called 'Tammy' again, though... not by her husband. Even Kohut had used the moniker sparingly since Brad's death. Making use of her middle name had been a simple compromise and she had no aversion to it, but the way Felix addressed her was always steeped in such reverence that she was always taken aback. Whether he was calling her by her name or simply calling her 'ma'am', he always sounded a little breathless, like he couldn't quite imagine the fact that he was even allowed to speak to her.

She would never figure out what she'd done to deserve that sort of veneration.

"Dreams aren't real," she said. "I'm fine because they can't hurt me because they're not real, no matter how frequent."

"People say the same thing about us, don't they?" he asked, and Tamora glanced at him again, one eyebrow arched fiercely. Felix rubbed the back of his neck. "I mean, the players," he said, "they think that we're not real, that we're just characters in a game. But, gosh, that doesn't make the things we do any less significant, right?"

Tamora sat up and hiked the wayward strap of her camisole back up onto her shoulder where it belonged. "Fix-It, what in the 99 levels of Tetris are you on about?"

He wrung his hands. "I'm saying that, well, just because you don't think something's real doesn't mean it's _not_ ," he insisted, shaking his head, "because... if that were true then maybe none of us are real, and that's just not somethin' I wanna think about."

Sometimes Tamora thought Felix was like a misplaced bracket looking for the right line of code to complete.

"'Real' is relative," she said, wagging a finger at him, "and what the players think is irrelevant to this situation. You can't tell me that a nightmare I'm _programmed_ to have is real, regardless of how many times it wakes me up."

"It's real to you, though, isn't it?" he asked, and she wrinkled her nose. He pressed on, "That's why it bothers you so much."

"Being scared of a bad dream is like running away from a ghost town you're not even sure is haunted," she insisted sharply.

Felix's eyes widened. "Jiminy, I never said you were scared."

Flak and shells, he _hadn't_ said that, had he? And she'd fallen for it. Clever man indeed--maybe that bracket knew where it was going the whole time and only _acted_ like it was lost.

Tamora inhaled to rebuff, then exhaled sharply without saying anything. There was a moment of thick silence and then Felix looked down at his hands. 

"I know you think fear is a... what is it you say, a four-letter word?" He glanced up at her for affirmation and she nodded once, her eyes narrow. He quirked his mouth. "I'm not quite sure what that means," he admitted, "because a lot of words only have four letters..."

Er, maybe the bracket was lost after all.

"I mean, your middle _name_ only has four letters..."

Maybe the bracket wasn't even in the right source code.

"I'm not even sure what the number of letters has to do with anything..."

Okay, suddenly she wasn't even sure it was in the right operating system.

"But I guess it doesn't matter so much if I don't get it."

"Fix-It, if you _have_ a point, feel free to meander in the general direction of it," she sighed hopelessly. 

She really didn't want to talk about this. She really didn't want to admit that the nightmares left her unsettled at all. It was stupid, she thought, that of all the things she'd experienced--six-foot drill sergeants looming over her at 4am reveille, plunging through unexplored terrain on an alien planet with nothing but a pistol and a machete, being ridiculed for being a woman the first day she was put in charge of her own troops, war, weapons, monsters, pain, _death_ \--the one thing that scared her, _really_ scared her, was _failure_. She had failed the perimeter check, she had failed to be prepared, she had failed to react quickly enough, and Brad had _died_ , and the thought of being that sort of failure again was the _only_ thing that could keep the sergeant up at night. She had made a point of keeping everyone at arm's length because it was easier to handle the idea of being _in charge_ of someone than it was to consider _caring_ about them. Certainly she cared about her troops; she would have done nigh anything to keep them safe, but it was different somehow. Soldiers died. It happened. Death was a risk they all knew and accepted when they put on the uniform--that chapel she had been married in (twice?) hadn't been built for weddings, it had been built for _funerals_.

But friends? Loved ones? They weren't supposed to die, and Tamora had taken pains to make sure the line between teammate and treasure was never crossed. If she failed as a commanding officer that was bad enough, but to fail as a comrade, a guardian, a _friend_... that was unbearable. She had already done that once, and the thought of letting it happen again, the idea of losing Felix the way she'd lost Brad, it _haunted_ her. It was her _job_ to keep her troops safe, her _job_ to get the rookies to the tower, her _job_ to get rid of the Cy-Bugs and make sure they didn't escape into the rest of the arcade. She didn't always accomplish her job. Sometimes the player never made it to the tower. Sometimes her men ran out of ammo and were killed. Sometimes ham-fisted idiots from other games unwittingly unleashed Cy-Bug invasions on their neighbors. She accepted that these things happened. But it was her _duty_ to protect the people who were most important to her, and though it was a fine line, failure of the latter responsibility was _not_ an option. There were times she cursed herself for ever letting anyone get near her heart again; it made everything harder.

Felix seemed to be attempting to collect his thoughts as she collected her own, and she decided she was done having this conversation. It wasn't even a conversation. Why were they even talking about this? With a grunt she flopped back to the mattress and rolled over sharply so that her back was to her husband.

"I'm going back to sleep," she said; "let me know in the morning if you figure out what you were trying to say."

His voice was thin at her back. "I just want to help." 

She sighed again. She knew he only wanted to help--he _always_ wanted to help, and that was one of the things she admired most about him. Unfortunately some things just couldn't be helped no matter how eager someone was.

Rolling over, she gave him an affected glower in the darkness. "Felix, you can't fix _everything_ ," she said, the soft tone in her voice belying the fierceness of her stare.

The expression on his face shifted then, his lips pursing together and one eyebrow arching dramatically toward his hairline. "I believe I'll be the judge of that," he said with a little more severity than was entirely necessary, and Tamora couldn't help herself. He just looked so serious and sounded so intense that she had to laugh. With a decidedly unbecoming snort of amusement she covered her mouth with one hand and attempted to keep her shoulders from shaking.

Felix tilted his head. 

"D-did I say somethin' funny?" he asked, and this only made it harder for her to stifle her laughter. Felix looked completely baffled, but seemed less concerned by this sudden shift into hilarity than he had been by the previous atmosphere. He extended a hand toward her, as if momentarily concerned that this fit of laughter wasn't entirely natural and something was _wrong,_ and then recoiled, a hand on his face and puzzlement in his eyes.

Regaining her composure, Tamora sat up again and shook her head hopelessly.

"Don't ever change," she said, leaning forward to plant a kiss on the crown of his head.

"M-Ma'am?" It was too dark to tell, but she was fairly certain his face was beet red.

Putting her hand on his cheek a moment, she rewarded him with a rare honest smile. She'd never known a man who stuck to his guns the way Felix did, and Felix didn't even really know how to shoot one properly. She didn't answer him or clarify what she'd meant, and instead just put her head down on her pillow again, hiking the sheet up over her shoulder.

"Just go back to sleep," she said; "I'm waking you at 5 to _fix_ me some pancakes whether you like it or not."

Felix scratched his head, then shrugged and laid down beside her, inhaling audibly when she snaked one arm around his middle and tugged him close to her. At the end of the day, maybe a dream for the future would eventually overcome a nightmare of the past. Maybe there was no way to escape the memories that had been programmed into her history, and maybe she would never really get over her fear of letting down the people that mattered to her. Maybe a shattered conscience and a bruised heart couldn't ever be completely repaired, but she guessed if Felix was confident he could fix any broken thing in his path, she could see fit to let him try.

**Author's Note:**

> I actually had no idea what to call this, and then [iTunes saved my life](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpzZPZ0u5zA).
> 
>   
> _you settle to sit on your hands_  
>  _and act like an adult when it's not what you want_  
>  _you can't even find the strength to say no_  
>  _where has the real you gone?_  
> 
> _anyone can soar_  
>  _into the great big sky just once_  
>  _starting today, shoot for the limit!_  
>  _for the future_
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> in other news, this pairing is impossibly adorable and i just want to write sappy fluffy cavity-inducing nonsense for them forever jashdgcksdfv


End file.
